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Installed a high-efficiency A/C 2 years ago but now considering adding an attic fan to cut down on Xcel bills and allow my A/C to last longer. Thoughts or experiences?
We have high ceilings and on hot summer days it takes hours for the AC to cool the bedrooms on the second floor down to sleeping temperature.
Yeah, most AC systems aren?t going to take a house that?s hot and cool it down very quickly. I make sure I kick mine on as soon as the weather starts getting warm and just leave it on until winter. It?s easier for the system to maintain the temperature in the house by cycling as necessary rather than running for hours on end trying to make drastic changes.Quote:
Originally Posted by kidicarus13
Anyhow, I am also thinking about some sort of fan system (mostly for spring and fall) so I?ll be following along.
I did a whole house fan last year with Quite Cool Love it. It was only $1800 or so. I open the windows after the temp cools off and run the fan an hour before going to bed.
I wonder if I proceed if it's worth getting multiple quotes or will they all come in within $300?Quote:
Originally Posted by electronman1729
They work great when the outdoor air is cool. Whatever it is outside, it will be inside, it will be inside. So when we have those summer nights where it's super warm at night, ya won't be cooling off so much. Good thing is that those kind of nights don't hang around much. They work really really well when the outside temps are to your liking.
We've had a whole house fan for about 12 years . . . and we also have central air. The whole house fan is glorious on the nights that get cool, especially when you get later into the summer and fall. It's flat-out amazing how fast and efficiently it can cool the entire house down. So we use it in conjunction with the A/C. A/C keeps the house cool during the day and then if it cools down significantly at night, we crank up the whole house fan and drop the temp down further for bedtime.
On those nights where it's not as cool, it's not as beneficial (or if it's raining hard and you can't leave the windows open or want all that humidity brought in). But even on those nights, you can cut the heat down a good chunk pretty fast especially on the second floor.
Colorado home cooling. Great installer. Specialist in whole house fans.
In Lakewood. Give them a ring.
Do you have ceiling fans? Start with the bedrooms and then the larger rooms where access to fish the wiring isn't too difficult.
Most of the fifteen years we lived in CO, we ran the AC for two weeks each summer. Most of the time we just worked the windows and blinds. Get up in the morning and close the windows and blinds while the house is still cool. The upstairs rooms would get warm afternoon, but we didn't use those rooms during the day. As the sun went down around 7PM or so, the blinds and windows would get opened. By 10PM or so, the house would begin cooling off. Ceiling fans really helped.
Low humidity is a real blessing in many ways out west.
We did that routine with just a whole house fan and some localized fans here since 1995. 2-story colonial of mid grade 2x4 construction. In 2003 I became PT WFH (with limited travel) and installed a window AC in my "office," a.k.a. one of the upstairs bedrooms. Older home just isn't setup for a ground floor office/study and we never built out the 2/3 basement. Did not expect to still be here, but here we are. in 2009 I became FT WFH (with more travel.)Quote:
Originally Posted by cstone
Finally installed a whole new HVAC system the spring of 2019 so I only run the house fan occasionally when I haven't kept the house cool enough and need to drop the temp quickly. Since we have continuously variable fan setups in the condenser and furnace/evap, it cuts down on elec use over the house fan so I don't do it once the house has cooled. We still try to keep the southern exposure closed up during the day, but it's not so important now.
If you need to evacuate a bunch of hot air, the house fan certainly helps.
When we bought our new-to-us house in 2017 it had a whole house fan but no AC. The whole house fan works very well to keep air moving through the house and to cool it down in the mornings and in the evenings. During the heat of the day, the whole house fan does nothing. We finally did install central AC last year and it was very nice, and not nearly as expensive as we'd feared it might be.
Overall we're happy with the AC but it's definitely nice to have the attic fan for those times when AC isn't necessary. It hasn't gotten hot enough for us to even turn the AC on yet this year but we've run the attic fan several times, usually we switch it on after about 6:00 and with the porch sliding glass door open and the front door open (both screened) it is amazing how quickly the house cools down.
That's actually one of the best things about the house fan - how quickly it works. If the house is hot and the air outside is cool, we switch on the attic fan and in minutes the house is several degrees cooler. The AC doesn't work nearly that fast.
I guess what I'm saying is that having both options makes a lot of sense here in CO. AC for those brutally hot August mid-days and the house fan for the "shoulder seasons" of Spring and Fall when it's hot but not hot enough to turn on the AC.
We're still tweaking our methods but what we seem to have arrived at is that if one of us is home during the day and we know it's going to be hot, we'll switch the AC off, open the doors and run the house fan until about 10:00, when it really starts warming up. Then we'll close up everything and turn the AC on.
Love ours! I work nights and when I get home in morning in the summer, open some windows around the shady sides and flood the house with that cool morning air. Starts warming up, off goes the fan, windows get closed, AC gets turned on. But the AC doesn't actually come on for several hours.
I should add that in our previous house, which was a ranch style (1 floor) with no basement (crawl space) in Engelwood, we had ceiling fans in every room. It would get uncomfortably hot almost every day in the Summer. We eventually put a window AC unit in our bedroom so we could sleep and I put one in my office as well for the days I worked from home, but our West facing living room was always over 80 degrees in mid Summer no matter how many ceiling fans we ran.
Put more simply, I don't think ceiling fans can hold a candle to an attic fan in terms of their ability to quickly cool down a house. In our current house (with the whole house fan) even before we put in the AC, if we ran the whole house fan in the evening, we ended up manually turning it off by midnight because it got too cold in the house.
The bottom line is that IMO a whole house/attic fan is a great addition to central AC in a multi-story house.
Our 1993 home, when we purchased in 2006, only had a whole house fan. A year later, we installed AC for those times when the temps don't get cool enough soon enough after sundown to cool the house for comfortable sleeping. Like someone else mentioned, we find that we get by without the AC for some time in the spring. For us, the house reaching the low 80s and it's still not cool enough outside to turn on the whole house fan usually marks the start of AC season.
If you have allergies, an attic fan is useless. For those of us with older houses/HVAC systems, I highly recommend an in-room AC unit like Costco carries...especially if your bedroom is upstairs. Works wonders, even if you have AC, but not individual room thermostats.
I should have added to my first post that when it was really hot and I needed an extra bump, I would turn on the sprinklers in the back with the patio door open and make it into one giant swamp cooler.
Yea water bill + elec bill...
I had an attic fan installed in my house a few years ago, and have been very pleased with it. Even on a very warm day, if I open the basement windows, it does a good job of pulling the cool air up from the basement and dropping the temperature of the house noticeably.
Forgot to mention, it also drags in every outdoor smell. Skunks, backyard camp fires, bbq, etc. my neighborhood loves to have fires on the patios. A whole house fan makes the house smell like you are camping. In the fire.
Something I did not consider. Neighbor two doors down has a fire going 85% of the time time in the evenings.Quote:
Originally Posted by colorider
Not safe for work.Quote:
Originally Posted by kidicarus13
https://youtu.be/pG4A8v-QHFA
I use a Hillbilly whole house fan. In the early morning when I get up. I put a box fan blowing out in a upstairs window on the west side and half open a couple of windows on the first floor north side. Run the the box fan on high until I go to work. This sucks in the cooler north side air and exhausts it up and out cooling the house down. At night I close the first floor windows and open the bedroom windows about 1/4 of the way and turn the fan to low still blowing out.
Keeps me from using the air conditioning for a few more weeks until it is just too hot outside.
I wouldn’t have a house without an attic fan! We use ours almost every day year round. Even in winter I like to run it for a few minutes to get fresh air in the house. Spring/fall we run it in the evenings and it gets the house plenty cool, the AC barely needs to run. During the hot months we run it for 10 minutes or so in the evening to get the attic temp down, which helps the AC not run so hard.
Adding to above post...if your neighbor sometimes sits on their back porch smoking weed, your house will smell like weed in no time when your fan is running.
As with every year, folks are using the incorrect terminology on this subject.........
Attachment 81522
And never turn on a whole house fan on while your fireplace or wood stove is lit........
I seriously doubt an attic fan has ever extended the life of any roof.
I couldn’t find the illustration that showed the differences between the two..... You know, pictures, not words.....Quote:
Originally Posted by Irving
Stand by. Took a picture of one just a few minutes ago.
No damage though.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-no?authuser=0
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0009SNSNE...osi&th=1&psc=1
For those not sure, the whole house fan in the house I grew up in was the size of a swamp cooler and just as loud. Great for parents and kids to not be able to hear each other at night.
Our whole house fan is loud as hell but it works pretty well.
Our old house in Englewood (ranch style, no basement) had one of those spinning attic vents on the roof that theoretically kept heat down in the attic. I don't know if it ever "worked" in the sense of lowering attic temps since I never compared with/without vent temps but every time I went into the attic during the Summer it was very, very hot.
I think people use the term "attic fan" and "whole house fan" interchangeably even though they are technically different things. Even growing up in the 70's we used to refer to the fan as the "attic fan" when it was of course the whole house fan.
A turbine vent isn't really the same thing as a powered attic vent.Quote:
Originally Posted by Martinjmpr